The Ugly American's Shadow
by James Norton

In the uniformly weird, generally chaotic and often degenerate world of online writing, Slate Magazine stands out. It prints smart content on pace with — or ahead of — the daily news cycle. It boasts top-flight journalistic ethics and quality (granted, with all the hand-wringing and self-analysis that entails). And it has star contributors who come from, or migrate to, publications up to and including The New York Times.

In short: While Slate's content tends to be smart, tight, contrarian and amusing, the organization is about sober and reliable as C-SPAN on a Wednesday afternoon.

Or so we thought. But then contributor Tad Friend began a journalistic pilgrimage that will be henceforth known as "The Segway Series."

It starts auspiciously enough: Friend and friends arrive at Paris, hoping to create an extended performance-art commercial on behalf of the amazing Segway Human Transporter. Conjuring up a bit of Hollywood magic with his lead, Friend...

Wait a second.

What is our correspondent doing flacking for a product? Can't Segway buy its own publicity? Aren't the deep pockets of Microsoft supposed to keep Slate from the tin-cup indignities that its tattered-but-proud online rival perpetrates on a regular basis?

A clearly labeled link at the end of the story gives us a look at the true depths of Slate's commercial wallowing — various luxury hotels, Air France and a local bike tour company have all donated services in return for berths on the product-placement gravy train.

A straw man might counter: "So what? So they took a completely disclosed junket, and wrote up a light confectionary diary piece? SO WHAT SO WHAT SO WHAT?"

Here's what: If you send a New Yorker staff writer on a weeklong junket to Paris, he or she had better start blasting gossamer prose from every orifice.

Friend's dispatches thus far, however, have been a confection of cutesy, Segway-promoting Paris street scenes sandwiched around the following analysis, presented in a sidelong, "this is sort of the consensus, people!" kind of way:

Americans are so dumb. Our mass culture is witless. Our intellectual culture is hollow. We're so unsophisticated! Even as I gently mock its pretenses, I will glorify the brilliance of Continental Europe.

Or, as Friend puts it:

[I]t is universally understood that an educated Frenchman's cultural role is to be the philosophe who produces nothing but can explain everything, while an educated American's — mais, quel paradoxe — is to be the idiot savant who can fashion wondrous things (DDT, thalidomide, bunker-buster bombs) but always uses them incorrectly.

Thalidomide! And so we are treated to a mention of French philosophers Voltaire and Sartre, followed by this little bon mot: "Of course, we have philosophers, too (Will Rogers, Fred Rogers)."

Stand back, because you — the reader — might get burned by all the wit. But what might Richard Rorty say about that remark? Or John Rawls? Or John Dewey? Or Thomas Jefferson? Etc. etc. etc.

Okay, yes — the tide of American public opinion is running hard and bloody against France at the moment. Every ignoramus and demogogue has climbed onto the bandwagon, shaking their pitchforks and howling like chimps at everything from Chateau Neuf du Pape to Jacques Chirac to French toast. It's only proper to rise to the defense of the worthy culture, politics and art that France brings to table.

But the smart answer can't possibly be a conversion into the classic Archly Self-Loathing American. Extolling Paris at the expense of middlebrow (and lowbrow) America simply turns the speaker into Limbaugh-bait, and rightly so — the prejudices of a Europhile snob are just as dull and unpleasant as those of Fox News.

Friend's dispatches may well improve as the week rolls on. And if there are any problems with having your writers do (well-disclosed) infotainment on behalf of major companies, they're unlikely to get much attention in the current climate, as the shadow of Jayson Blair, the hilarious Kid Judas of Journalism, continues to deface the landscape.

But still: Common sense suggests that when picking a writer to do a thought-provoking piece on Paris, you probably shouldn't send Pat Buchanan. And now we know the new contrarian flipside: Don't send his opposite, either.

E-mail James Norton at jrnorton@flakmag.com.